In Timbuktu, Tamasheq is spoken, a variant of the Tuareg languages ??that in turn diverges into Tanaslamt and Tadghaq. Mali has just repealed French as its official language. There the population speaks Bambara, Fula, Malinke, Soninke, Dogon, Senoufo, Songhay… and education is bilingual, combining French with up to thirteen national languages, so that any reading of a hypothetical PISA report based on the ballast of bilingualism on reading comprehension and mathematics would make for quite a few jokes.
The poor underdeveloped child population would also be in China if the combination of alphabets and ideographic systems were considered a problem, since English is a secondary vehicular language there. In short, even in Norway, children would have to regret having English included from the first levels of schooling. And French, Spanish and German from lower secondary school. What a way to confuse you, poor people!
There is nothing more plastic than the mind of a minor, for good and bad. Nor is there anything more retrograde than insisting that there is a relationship between the drop in reading comprehension results shown by the PISA report in Catalonia and the fact that Catalan is the vehicular language there. For some, the reason would be that schoolchildren are less exposed to their own language due to communicative globalization: they watch fewer children’s programs on TV3 and more content from networks and platforms in Spanish or English. On the other hand, there are those who think that for them to progress they would have to be freed from Catalan, instead of having them tied to vernacular TV. Luckily, the Gremi d’Editors de Catalunya predicts a 12% increase in the sale of books in the Catalan language in 2023…
It is curious what it means for a language not to have a State behind it. The French, without going any further, have less to fight in Timbuktu than in Catalonia. The other day, at the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo, an elderly French journalist approached me to inform me that he has stopped attending a festival in Empordà because he uses Catalan in the programs. “How can you be so small!” he said. How can it be so old!
